Hot Springs officials are preparing for the 2024 total solar eclipse by taking some advice from a city that found itself in a similar position during the eclipse of 2017.
The eclipse's path of totality will pass directly over Hot Springs, which has been included in lists of key locations from which to view it, including Forbes.com's "It's Just 1,000 Sleeps Until The Next 'Great American Eclipse.' It's Time to Dream -- And Plan."
Visit Hot Springs has set up the website https://www.totaleclipsearkansas.com to count down the days until the eclipse.
In just a little over 900 days, officials predict the city will be inundated with tourists traveling here to get the perfect view of the April 8, 2024, total eclipse of the sun.
"The big thing is, is this event, we can't stop it. It's not a ticketed event. We can't shut the doors," Bill Solleder, director of marketing for Visit Hot Springs, said. "The sun is going to go away for four minutes no matter what. People are going to come to Hot Springs to see the eclipse and it could be a bit overwhelming."
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Brook Kaufman, CEO of Visit Casper in Wyoming, gave a presentation to officials on Friday explaining what the similarly positioned city did right and wrong to prepare for the wave of visitors four years ago.
Kaufman said when they realized they were going to be directly in the line of totality in 2017 there was "so much fear and unknown," as the last eclipse had happened decades prior, and there was nothing for them to go off of to prepare.
Though they knew it was coming, Kaufman said it took their community a very long time to figure out who would be in charge of planning, with different agencies being hesitant to act. They ended up forming a separate 501(c)(3) for the Wyoming Eclipse Festival to handle staff, insurance, and other matters.
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This gave them the benefit of having a dedicated resource and leader for the event, something she said really helped and also mitigated risk by affording a degree of separation from the city and county in case something went wrong.
Kaufman said they also created an "A-team" that involved County Health, medical centers, game and fish, city services and more, without anyone being in charge.
"The communication between our agencies was just incredible and it's really what allowed us to keep people safe and have a very, very successful festival," she said.
Though there's still around 30 months before the next eclipse, Kaufman recommended that Hot Springs not wait to figure out who's in charge. Solleder also said the city would need to think about appointing a task force, which he volunteered to be on.
For a county of 80,000 people, Kaufman said they had $7.5 million dollars of economic impact with about $500,000 in sales tax over a five-day period. Garland County's population is around 99,000 according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Kaufman said 83% of their residents ended up participating in 2017 in some capacity.
She warned that one of the things they hadn't been prepared for in 2017 was the impact on traffic flow.
"Usually, from Casper to Denver is a four-hour drive. Right after the eclipse, ours was at 11:42 in the morning, I would say by 12:30 that day the interstate was backed up and it took about 10 hours to get to Denver," she said.
The 2024 eclipse will be on a Monday, a school day, which Kaufman said means people will need to plan ahead.
"You need to be thinking of how to be moving people around and keep people safe," she said.
Kim Williams, project manager for the 2024 Great North American Total Eclipse with Arkansas Tourism, said she met with several state agencies on Monday, including the Arkansas Department of Transportation, to make sure they were aware of the incoming event. She said the state is working on creating a task force, as well.
"I'm not here to scare anyone, but you have to tell the good with the bad, because, y'all this is going to be so much good," she said. "This is going to be the biggest event the state of Arkansas has ever seen."
